(ML)$^2$P-Encoder: On Exploration of Channel-Class Correlation for Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning

Recent studies usually approach multi-label zero-shot learning (MLZSL) with visual-semantic mapping on spatial-class correlation, which can be computationally costly, and worse still, fails to capture fine-grained class-specific semantics. We observe that different channels may usually have different sensitivities on classes, which can correspond to specific semantics. Such an intrinsic channel-class correlation suggests a potential alternative for the more accurate and class-harmonious feature representations. In this paper, our interest is to fully explore the power of channel-class correlation as the unique base for MLZSL. Specifically, we propose a light yet efficient Multi-Label Multi-Layer Perceptron-based Encoder, dubbed (ML)^2P-Encoder, to extract and preserve channel-wise semantics. We reorganize the generated feature maps into several groups, of which each of them can be trained independently with (ML)^2P-Encoder. On top of that, a global group-wise attention module is further designed to build the multi-label specific class relationships among different classes, which eventually fulfills a novel Channel-Class Correlation MLZSL framework (C^3-MLZSL). Extensive experiments on large-scale MLZSL benchmarks including NUS-WIDE and Open-Images-V4 demonstrate the superiority of our model against other representative state-of-the-art models.